Page 102 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Nicholas couldn’t say what. A feeling: a prickle across his skin like achange in temperature, a barometric shift in the air. Even as his fingers found the switch and the overhead came on, he was flinching away from what he might find.

Richard and Maram, their eyes narrowed in the sudden light.

At his side, Nicholas heard Esther’s intake of breath, but his own lungs had entirely ceased to function. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t blink, could only stand frozen and staring. Maram was seated in a high-backed chair by Richard’s desk and Richard was on his feet beside her, one hand resting possessively on her shoulder. In that tall chair, with tall Richard at her side, surrounded by the towering shelves packed with relics and curiosities, Maram appeared very small. Nicholas looked to her wrists, to her ankles—was she tied?—but she didn’t appear to be restrained in any visible way.

“You see?” Maram said. She was speaking to Richard and seemed to be smiling, or at least her mouth was curved up. She didn’t even glance at Esther. “I told you they’d come.”

“You did,” Richard said, nodding, with the quiet, pleased expression Nicholas had always longed to find turned on him. “I suppose I’ll have to forgive you for your scheming, after all.”

Esther’s fingers were tight around Nicholas’s arm. His vision was wavering in and out of focus, the study’s many details blurring and then sharpening with brutal clarity, a tumult of random images: Maram’s hands folded calmly in her lap, the crushed red of a velvet box, the stuffed monkey’s endless black stare from its perch on an upper shelf, the dull curve of a clay amphora, the shine of the glass jar where his eye still sat suspended.

The glint of metal in Richard’s hand as he moved away from Maram and toward Nicholas and Esther, his long legs eating the space between them so quickly that Nicholas didn’t realize what was happening until it happened.

Richard was holding a gun.

At Nicholas’s side Esther went completely silent and still. Her fast breath stopped. She let go of Nicholas’s arm. The barrel was pointed directly at her head.

32

Collins was drinking. Joanna might even add “heavily.” He’d had three beers in the past thirty minutes and had left her alone on the porch to go inside and get another one. But when he came back outside again, he was empty-handed.

“It wasn’t helping,” he said in explanation, thumping back down on the step beside her and rubbing his hands vigorously through his hair. “I’m still stressed the hell out.”

He’d dragged Joanna away from her panicked vigil at the mirror by suggesting her cat friend might be hungry, then had insisted on opening one of the little cans of Sir Kiwi’s high-end dog food Nicholas had brought, muttering about the mercury content and high sodium of the tuna Joanna had been using. It was clear he needed a task, so she had let him find a can opener and pour it into the bowl, but so far, the cat had not shown its furry face. Probably because it had been offered dog food.

“The cold is calming me down, though,” said Joanna. “You were right to come outdoors.”

Agitation had overheated her to the point where the sweat on her brow was only just beginning to dry in the chilly breeze.

“They’ll be all right,” Collins said. “Maram knows what she’s doing. She wouldn’t have gone through all this convoluted shit if she didn’t think it would work.”

He’d been repeating variations on these sentences since Esther and Nicholas had vanished through the mirror and Joanna hadn’t yet figured out a reply. In part because she wasn’t certain she believed him, and in part because she wasn’t certain how to talk to him now that the other two had gone. She’d never spent so much time alone with an adult personher own age before, much less an adult man, much less an adult man she found attractive. She took a deep breath, pulling her jacket more tightly around her body and glancing sideways at him. In the golden porch light his lashes cast long, sooty shadows on his cheeks, and he was chewing on his lower lip in a way that made her want to stomp her foot. The sight was, at least, a good distraction from Joanna’s fear.

“How did you end up involved in all this, anyway?” she said. “I mean books in general, not only the Library.”

Collins leaned down to dig a pebble from the dirt at his feet. It looked very pale in the porch light, like a shard of bone.

“My grandmother had a book,” he said. He chucked the pebble into the yard and went for another one. “She passed it down to my mother, along with the ability to hear them. Ours was from the U.S., about 1900. It let you see through the eyes of the nearest bird. The ink was already pretty faded, but my mom let my sister and I each read it on our sixteenth birthdays. She drove us outside the city, so we’d have a chance to get something other than a pigeon.”

“What was it like?”

Collins smiled out at the dark trees. “My birthday’s in May and I flew in the body of a heron over the Assabet River. There was lilac blooming everywhere. I still dream about it.”

“Can your sister hear magic, too?”

“Yeah, though she’s more of a... like, a hobbyist. I was the one who went really wild for it. I went deep into the internet and found a bunch of message boards that eventually connected us to the Boston crew.”

For Joanna the internet was a once-a-week, ten-minute obligation at the local library. Though she knew people used it to reach out, to make connections, it had never occurred to her that she herself could have used it like that or been one of those people.

She said, “Could you have told me any of that under your NDA?”

Collins watched another pebble soar across the yard and shook his head.

“It must feel good to be able to say it now,” she said.

“It does.” He dusted off his hands and let them hang between his knees. “You know, when I finally met other people who knew about this stuff, it felt like the whole world had cracked its lid on me.”

“Was that a good thing or a bad thing?”

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